The Swivel

THAT WAS THEN. NOW ASSASSINATION IS GOOD: New Yorker Mag called the special ops team today hailed by Obama, VP Cheney’s “personal assassination team.”

Now that it might serve Obama's re-election efforts, assassination becomes heroic.

I'm sure there will be plenty of Glenn Greenwald types who in the next few days will start whining about assassination being a bad thing and a denial of civil rights, but right now it is useful to them to hail the conquering hero:

The kinetic military action in Libya has been doing a bang-up job of sapping both [our morale and credibility], and fracturing NATO, for weeks. This unambiguous success helps end that skid, and might just turn President Obama into an actual president. As others have said elsewhere, for the first time in my adult life I’m actually proud of him. I still won’t vote for him and I encourage others to oppose his re-election too, but at least when it was time to make a serious decision, he made the right one.

It could be argued that this is one instance when his dithering worked out, but I have no doubt that, sitting in a room with your advisers, watching an operation like this one proceed gets one's blood up, and you really want it to succeed so that you don't look like Jim Jong Il Carter, after the operation to rescue our hostages in Iran failed in such a dismal, inept way.

After the many years of hearing nothing but negative about our military, Desert Storm and especially the invasion of Iraq filled me will pride and awe that we still had such heroes leading and serving. Yes, there was Abu Ghraib, but that was an aberration, inevitable in a force of half a million. These wars have been fought largely with National Guard Reserve troops, who have performed heroically, especially considering the disruption of their lives and the difficulties faced by those they left behind. Knowing this should make any President leery of launching a war without the commitment to winning it, and letting our people fight without political fetters on their rules of engagement.